


The Beauty and the Crest Beast

by Sleepington



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 02:19:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20499248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sleepington/pseuds/Sleepington
Summary: A short story about Marianne during the timeskip based on her supports with Dimitri and Byleth.





	The Beauty and the Crest Beast

The assault on Garreg Mach sweeps Marianne’s classmates to the winds, leaving her alone again. For nine months her wish for an excuse to leave the academy had waned until her place there had been worth risking her life to keep. She should have known she would be of no use. All her efforts earned her was the excuse to leave as a consolation prize, which she runs with all the way home.

_It’s for the best. All my fears but one have come true and the last is sure to come._

Byleth had denied Marianne was more trouble than she was worth, but Byleth was dead. Dimitri had said he’d be there for Marianne whether she liked it or not, but Dimitri was dead. Despite their claims, the evidence mounts grave by grave.

_The beast in my blood will place mine alongside theirs soon enough. The only question is when._

Marianne answers the thought with the same course of action for herself that would be given to any ravenous beast. She locks herself away. The curse catches her in her nightmares, twisting her memory of Miklan’s transformation into a crest beast until she stands in his place. Her classmates’ screams haunt her nights.

Yet she can’t bring herself to seek help. For all her fears of the curse, Professor Hanneman examining her crest only offers the threat of confirming the worst. Every goosebump and ache threatens her with the possibility that it is the first sign of the bestial metamorphosis. Even when she feels nothing, Blutgang is there, hung above the mantle with pride by the margrave, but reminding her of what awaits. 

That constant fear drives her from the margrave’s home for the first time in months to throw Blutgang into the lake on the Edmund estate. As her baleful inheritance disappears beneath the rippling water, she thinks, I wouldn’t regret losing this life.

_That’s all wrong._

Her own words come back to her. Once given in rebuttal to Dimitri’s disregard for his own life, they rebuke her own.

Marianne slumps onto the lakeshore, cradling her knees to rest her head against them. She had wanted him to be more concerned about his own safety and he had said, “Well, I suppose I could improve in that regard.”

_So could I, Dimitri,_ Marianne thinks, then falls back to lay upon the grass as tired as after the defeat at Garreg Mach.

_“Goddess, please take back the life you gave me,” I prayed daily for so long. Even so, I never support such thoughts when I hear anyone else wishing something similar for themselves. _

The thought spurs laughter buried under melancholy since she helped make graves for those who fell at Garreg Mach. It is a joke to have a brain that views anyone else’s death with heartbreak yet callously considers its own. Her laughter doesn't fade until the downy feathers of a nightingale nudges against her as if to ask, "Are you okay?" 

"I don't know," Marianne says, cradling the bird within both palms. "It turns out I'm a poor judge of anything relating to myself. But if I can change that, if I can view myself with the same sympathy I give others, maybe I can find a way to okay."


End file.
